


Lineage

by narsus



Category: Hannibal Rising (2007), Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner
Genre: Backstory, Crossover, Dark, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-17
Updated: 2017-01-17
Packaged: 2018-09-18 06:21:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9372035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narsus/pseuds/narsus
Summary: In the end she starts to wonder if the fault lies in some fracture of her bloodline.The follow on to a throw-away comment I made in my end notes forContrivance.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Hannibal Rising belongs to Thomas Harris, Dino De Laurentiis and associates. Shin Megami Tensei - Devil Summoner belongs to Atlus, Sega and associates. Devil Summoner: Kuzunoha Raidou tai Kodoku-no-Marebito belongs to Taiyō Makabe, Anjū Harada, Kirihito Ayamura and associates.

She tells the story in the way that it needs to be heard. In the only way that it will be understood. It's a simpler explanation to cut off her whole family in one fell swoop. It makes her distant veneration of her ancestors a saner exercise. Much easier to polish ancient armour and pay her respects to her lost family than ponder the possibility that her elder brother escaped it all.

He shouldn't have. He'd been an officer in the Imperial Army: he should have died bravely defending their land. Instead he'd left the army claiming disgust at the nepotism he saw around him, which might have rung true, if it hadn't seemed like a convenient cover for his growing madness. He was almost two decades older so they hadn't spent much time together but she remembers his swift changes in temper even all she remembers is very little. He was kind and gentle much of the time. Until he wasn't. She remembers the fey light in his eyes when his mood would shift. He'd look like an entirely different person. She'd sometimes wondered as a child if there was something else that occasionally climbed up and looked out of his eyes.

Crows had always seemed fond of her brother which should have been auspicious in some respects. Perhaps it would have been if he hadn't seen them everywhere and hadn't taken the shadow of their wings to absolve him of any guilt for the devastation he could cause in his rages. If only they'd been conventional bursts of anger she might have understood but that wasn't the way things happened. People died when her brother was angry. Not immediately, not in brawls gone awry or in a fury of hot blood. Instead they died later. Often obscurely. So many accidents just seemed to happen when her brother was in a rage.

She supposes that she shouldn't be too surprised at the outcome. His cold fury was a study in silences. Then another boy would drown in a river or a shopkeeper would accidentally slice open an artery or a fellow officer would hang himself in an outhouse. Things like that happened _around_ her brother. Nothing every came of it though. Investigation after investigation and nobody could make any sense of it. She supposes that nobody wanted to question too closely his mad eyes or his mutters about the will of Heaven.

She'd thought about looking for him before she left. She hadn't, but for a moment the tie of blood had seemed like a necessary thing, before she thought better of it. The last she'd heard he was in Tokyo working as a private detective so perhaps he'd escaped destruction. She'd heard that he took cases from the rich and powerful and that that was protection enough to hide his obsessions regardless of outcomes. She'd heard about the schoolboy too, the softly spoken teenager with eyes that seemed to stare straight into your soul, who cleaved to him. It had made the superstitious part of her wonder if her brother's demons had finally come calling.

She tries not to think of her brother at all once she leaves Japan. Instead she prays for her parents and her grandparents, her aunts and uncles and cousins. She doesn't even tell Robert that she has a brother at all. She tells him that all her family are gone which is the truth in many ways. She tells Hannibal the same thing. Even when she teaches him to fight, in the same way that her brother taught her, she maintains that there is nobody left in her homeland. If she clings to this version of events for long enough it might eventually become true.

In the end, she starts to wonder if the fault lies, not with her necessarily, but in some fracture of her bloodline. She wonders if her proximity to Hannibal helps him tip into the same madness that always seemed to lurk just behind her brother's eyes. At least Hannibal is avenging a great and terrible injustice she tells herself. He has taken his strength and courage and used it to transform himself into a monster capable of taking revenge for his human self. In many ways he is justified. He made a promise and will follow it through to the bitter end. Hannibal was a child when he made an oath that he probably never understood. She mourns both his promise and the consequences.

These days Hannibal's picture sits alongside that of her parents and her husband. She prays for all of them. The last remaining photograph that she has of her brother is hidden a draw beneath their pictures. Sometimes she takes his photograph out and examines it. It's an old photograph of her brother, in his uniform, smiling brightly. As far as she can tell, in every inspection of the image, he looks human. Yet she's not certain if her eyes are playing tricks on her. Perhaps they aren't. Perhaps this is what her brother's always looked like. Perhaps this is the face that so many have seen as they die. Her brother was always smiling as far as she recalls. Perhaps he's still smiling now as he surveys his growing mountain of corpses.

She knows Hannibal has gone west and she's glad of it. She will live out the rest of her life here in France. She cannot follow him down the dark path he walks. She doesn't want to. Neither can she go back to the land where she was born. She will remain here in the land that became home. She feels as if she must stay here, as if, foolishly, she is a fixed point in a barrier between her brother's madness and her nephew's. Perhaps the further he travels the more Hannibal will be free of it. Once his mission is over perhaps the dread oath he took will set him free. She likes to think that it will and that one day his gentleness will return to him. It's a comforting thought that comes to her often. Yet in the depths of her ruminations she deliberately ignores the question that she refuses to articulate: that if Hannibal swore away his humanity to avenge his sister what was it that her brother promised in exchange for his madness?


End file.
